Nancy Taylor Robson

Yard by yard, property by property, Dr. Doug Tallamy, Entomology and Wildlife Ecology professor at University of Delaware, believes it’s possible to reverse the damage that wanton, unthinking ‘development’ has wrought. He believes it because he’s seen it on his own property. When he and wife Cindy moved into a house on a swathe of virtually uninterrupted lawn, he began to plant. Years later, it’s a wealth of wildlife, fragrance, beauty and habitat that proves that ‘if you build it, they will come.’

Author of several books, including Bringing Nature Home, that detail the needs of wildlife and the benefits to humankind, Tallamy’s latest effort to reverse the damage and with it mitigate climate change is Homegrown National Park, an idea whose time has definitely come. 

The Homegrown National Park program encourages every property owner to plant and steward their property for the sake of the lives of the food web on which we all depend for our own lives.

He reminds us that each of us manages a corner of the earth that when joined to our neighbors’ properties is part of a larger landscape. His point is that together we can create a national park of naturalized spaces everyone can enjoy that also hugely benefits the environment and mitigates the damage that has produced climate change. The Homegrown National Park program, which offers human connection, science-based information and sources, gives both concrete (she said ironically) steps to take and encouragement for what those steps will produce. Planting for pollinators, which draws a wonderful parade of butterflies and birdlife (something that many in Pandemic 2020 unexpectedly reveled in) and produces not only a more beautiful property but also a more valuable one. It also helps to diminish ambient temperatures while beginning to replace the millions of acres of habitat lost to the food desert that is created by unbroken expanses of chemically sustained lawn. It’s win-win, and it all starts with a commitment to improve your own little piece of earth. Visit https://homegrownnationalpark.org. (There’s also a spiffy sign you can put in your property to wow the neighbors!)

We had dinner last night with friends who live on their own and are in their late eighties — active, smart, irritating and kind friends, who are like family since they have been part of my husband’s landscape since he was a kid. They are failing, rather suddenly, both physically and mentally. They are, essentially, family, and no matter our differences over the years, we love them. So, we want to help. The question is: How?

On the one hand, it’s not officially any of our business. On the other, as human beings and neighbors, we are all interconnected and we affect and are affected by each other. If we haven’t learned that this past Covid year, we haven’t been paying attention AT ALL.

There are hurtles to what we view as helping: they have always been extremely active and independent; they have no access to public transportation; they have actual family who are in dispute over whether or not they need help.

And yet, yesterday evening it almost seemed as thought the husband was showing us that he knew he needed help, that he was recruiting us, not to come take care of them, but to help them make a decision about a change that they would most likely fight tooth and nail, and that at least one of their children will likely work hard to block. Rock and hard place come to mind.

Even when it’s your own family, it can be difficult. My brother and I completely agreed on the situation my father was in before he died — terminal cancer, should not have been driving, married to an alcoholic — but we totally disagreed about how to tackle the problem(s). We stumbled along, sometimes working in concert, sometimes arguing, (i once hung up on him in the midst of his giving me a lecture about how wrong I was — it felt very good), and praying that our dad wouldn’t hurt anyone before he shuffled off this mortal coil. That was the biggie for us both. No stranger to strong drink, blind in one eye, with only one arm and one leg operational, he should not have been driving. Even when my brother took away the keys, our stepmother let him drive her car.

In the fullness of time, our dad made it out of this life peacefully — I was with him — without hurting anyone, for which my brother and I were both grateful. There was no malice in our dad at all — there was fear and denial and perhaps selfishness, but no malice. Which is true of our friends. (And possibly most of us).

We were lucky. Our stepmother later died in a single-car crash. I was grateful it had not happened on our watch.

“Watch” is one of the operative words in this: we have not figured out any way to actively help our friends — except to be there. So, when she drives to our house several times a week and bangs on the door, I walk the yard with her for a while. When invited, we go to their house for dinner and help to cook, clear up, listen to oft-told stories and answer the same question six times. It doesn’t feel like enough, or even the right thing. But it’s what we can do, and that may be what love and support look like.

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For several days I’ve had a bookmark on a post that I’d read but had not linked to (from sheer laziness primarily, but also a little bit of clearing out, so I’m not a complete slug). Then a friend had a fall, ended up in the hospital and as of yesterday, had a new hip installed. I’m so grateful that my friend will be OK in time. I’m also grateful that replacement parts are available. (We can have the insurance discussion later).

However, prevention’s by far the better route. To that end, when I read the post (link below), I thought: A) yep, gonna link and post that and B) yep, gonna make a greater, more concentrated effort to expand my stretching and what I do to keep muscle tone and therefore balance and an active life.

OK Now What? A Caregiver’s Guide to What Matters* (as I never tire of saying, the winner of the Friendly Caregiver Award from Caregiver Today magazine) has RN-experience-based recommendations for good body mechanics for those who are caring for people struggling with mobility — a means of retaining their own stability. It’s all about maintenance!

caregiver.com

*available at:

Head to Wind Publishing

amazon

Check out the great work Annapolis Maritime Museum is doing teaching environmental understanding and with it, stewardship. Article link below.

Chesapeake Bay Magazine

 

 

by Nancy Taylor Robson

Published in 2013 by GWA (now GardenComm) the national garden communicators’ association

Nativar, a term coined by University of Georgia horticulturist Dr. Allan Armitage, has something like cult status among gardening cognoscenti.

“There’s a huge discussion about it,” says Jillian Zettig, horticulturist and landscape designer at Johnson Nursery in Menomonee Falls, WI.

Derived from mashing together ‘native’ and ‘cultivar’ (which itself is a combination of “cultivated variety’) the term nativar refers to a cultivar of a native plant species. Armitage says he coined it to signal to his daughter the connection between native parentage and cultivar offspring.

“Whether natural or manmade in the world of the native plant – Rudbeckia, Coreopsis, Gaura – I wanted to let her know it’s a cultivar of a native plant,” Armitage explains.

What exactly is a nativar? According to Grace Chapman, Director of Horticulture at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, nativars are: plants that have adapted from the straight species; that are either a natural cross pollination or a natural mutation; that are the result of a human-made cross pollination; or are genetically modified plants.  Abreeder starts with a native plant then selects to change specific cultural qualities or enhance a plant’s aesthetics.The ‘new and improved’ versions of natives help to sell the idea of native plants to landscapers and gardeners, who are often looking for a visual POP! that native plants don’t always deliver.

“They’re the ‘WOW’ plants of our native flora,” says Mike Yanny of Johnson Nursery in Menomonee Falls, WI. “They were selected for some characteristic or combination of characteristics that make them superior to the average seedling. For instance, Carpinus caroliniana‘J.N. Upright’, Firespire® Musclewood was selected for having extraordinary orange-red fall color and an upright, barrel-shaped form.”

While native plant purists aren’t always sold on the idea of nativars, Armitage insists that they have an important function in horticulture.

“The native plant movement is terrific, and especially for those who are doing reclamation work and ecological replanting,” he says. “However, if we take that native plant movement into the real world of landscapes and gardens, then cultivars must be considered if the native plant movement wants to make native plants more mainstream.”

Landscapers and designers usually weigh aesthetics heavily, and nativars tend to outshine their native parents in the looks department. But the term nativar also implies that it carries a genetic bonus bestowed by its native parent.

“The huge advantage of anything derived from native species is its potential adaptation to new circumstances,” says Dr. Donald Falk, professor of natural resources and restoration ecology at University of Arizona.

However, an individual nativar may or may not be endowed with the same adaptive gifts as its forbear.

“The [aesthetic focus] has nothing to do with tolerating or being a productive member of the environment,” says Dr. William Bauerle, plant physiologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO.

“Cultivars lack genetic diversity,” says Dr. Sara Tangren, founder of Chesapeake Natives Nursery, who taught environmental policy at Johns Hopkins. Tangren says that nativars have distinct, well-defined traits that are reliably reproducible because genetically, the nativar is usually many copies of an individual, which can be an ecological shortcoming.

“The key to surviving changing times like ours is to have a reservoir of genetic variability,” says Falk. “In the restoration field, people are really aware that native species probably have adaptations in their gene pool that … could become important to the species’ survival as well as that species’ contribution to the ecology as a whole.”

Another factor to consider in the nativar equation is ecotype, something Yanny feels strongly about identifying to a customer.

“People who are selecting that nativar to benefit the ecology need to pay close attention to the ecotype as well as the provenance (the wider native region of the original species) to make it really useful,” he says. “Different ecotypes of a single species can even vary within as short a distance as 20 miles apart.”

Ecotypes are native plants of a given species that have evolved in and adapted to the demands of a specific region (along with that region’s plant and animal populations). For example, the North American Aster is native to most of the eastern US. Yet the ecotype from Montgomery County, MD that Tangren grew without irrigation during a drought-stricken year was three times the size with five times the bloom of the same species that grew beside it whose seed had originated in Erie County, NY. The Montgomery ecotype was much better adapted to the ravages of a Maryland summer than the northern ecotype.

So are nativars productive members of a sustainable landscape?

“It’s a premature question,” says Dr. Doug Tallamy, University of Delaware entomologist and author of Bringing Nature Home(Timber Press, 2009). “When I talk about the effect of a cultivar on the productivity of that plant, I’m talking about food webs, which means more than pollinators. For example, is it going to change the number of caterpillars [a key protein source for baby birds] that it can produce? You can affect pollinators without affecting caterpillar production. A change in leaf chemistry can end up poisoning caterpillars,” he explains. “And if you take any flower and increase its size, you’re messing with the flower energy budget so there will be less for production of pollen and nectar. Or if you change color pattern, some specialized pollinators won’t be able to find it. These are all guesses, and it all needs to be measured.”

How nativars do or don’t fit into a sustainable landscape is a question that has no definitive answers based in research – yet.

“Everyone’s asking the question,” says Tallamy, “but the research hasn’t been done, though it looks like Mt Cuba is funding [University of Delaware] to do some of this research.”